I'll add some commentary later, but for now this will suffice:
This from the New York Times:
The morning after he pulled negotiators from trade talks in Washington and set off a new round of American tariffs, Prime Minister Mark Carney called the U.S. proposal “a bad deal” and said Canada was “at war” with the United States...
In a muscular [and bilingual], 22-minute speech that let Canadians — and Americans — know exactly where he stands, Mr. Carney said that Canada was under attack by President Trump’s punishing tariffs.“You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked,” Mr. Carney said.But unlike his electrifying speech at Davos that spoke of a rupture in the world order, Mr. Carney explicitly named the United States as an aggressor and a threat to Canada and the global economy.“We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed,” he said in an address to Canadians on Saturday. “We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.”Among other things, Mr. Carney said that American negotiators pushed to roll back Canada’s efforts to promote Canadian and French language content in online streaming services, subsidies for industries like publishing and film production and even mandatory labeling in French, an official language in Canada, as well as English on packaging... [note that Carney's speech was bilingual, alternating between English and French]As he did on Friday night, Mr. Carney suggested on Saturday that Canada would now double down on its strategy of disengaging from the U.S. economy, expanding trade with other countries and diversifying Canada’s economy.“Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us and I promised: ‘That will never, ever happen,’” Mr. Carney said. “We are keeping that promise. Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America.”
There will be lots more analysis and commentary available tomorrow, and especially Monday when the financial markets start responding...
This from the I Fucking Love Australia Facebook thread:
Twelve hours after telling his negotiators to come home, Mark Carney stood up in Ottawa and did something no one in Washington saw coming, because none of the bastards own a library card.He quoted a sixty-year-old slogan. Seven polite little words: "We are masters in our own home." Sounds like a tea towel, right? Mate, that phrase is dynamite with a bilingual fuse. It's the battle cry Quebec used in 1962, right before it seized the fucking power stations. And the bloke who just aimed it at Washington owns the grid half of America's northern border runs on, two-thirds of America's imported crude, the uranium, and the fertiliser.Trump thinks he's in a trade war. He's actually standing in a house where the other bloke holds every lever, and on Saturday the other bloke smiled and mentioned it. In two languages. With the pulse of a man ordering a flat white.The full breakdown is live: the hidden threat in the speech nobody clocked, the energy numbers that should terrify the White House, the Doug Ford playbook that started it all, and the question Canberra's too gutless to answer.King Carney doesn't forecast the weather anymore. He makes it.
And this from the same source slightly earlier:
At two minutes to midnight, Mark Carney looked at the most powerful man on Earth, checked his watch, and told his negotiators to get on the plane. Fuck this wanker, we're going home.And half the world's press still thinks he stormed out. He didn't storm anywhere, mate. The bloke ran two central banks through two catastrophes, and he's just done the coldest piece of arithmetic in modern trade history: the midterms are TEN WEEKS away, Trump's approval is circling the drain, and every deal signed with that man is worth the paper, the frame, and fuck-all else. Ask CUSMA. He tariffed his own trophy deal over BOURBON SHELF PLACEMENT.So Carney walked, matched him dollar for bloody dollar, and left the demolition to American voters. Why sign anything with a bloke whose signature depreciates faster than a secondhand jet ski?The full evisceration is live now: the Depression-era law he dug out of the shed, the whiskey ultimatum you won't believe is real, and why an empty calendar is the most aggressive document in world politics right now.King Carney reads the clock. And the clock says November.
